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SQLServerCentral Article

Advanced SQL Server Page Forensics: Detecting Page Splits and Allocations with DBCC PAGE

Page splits are an often-overlooked performance killer in SQL Server. In this article, we take a forensic look at how serial inserts differ from mid-table inserts, revealing why inserting rows out of order causes hidden page splits, increased IO, and fragmentation. Using a wide-column table, we demonstrate both scenarios and decode their impact with page-level analysis.

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2025-09-02 (first published: )

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SQLServerCentral Article

Deprecated but Forgotten: Why SQL Server’s Text, NText, and Image Data Types Still Haunt Your Systems

TEXT, NTEXT, and IMAGE columns have been deprecated for nearly two decades, yet they still silently haunt many SQL Server environments. This article explains their hidden limitations with practical demos and shows why migrating to VARCHAR(MAX), NVARCHAR(MAX), and VARBINARY(MAX) is critical for modern performance, maintainability, and future upgrades.

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2025-09-02 (first published: )

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SQLServerCentral Article

How to Access and Use Azure Key Vault Secrets in an Azure Devops Pipeline

When you run a CI/CD pipeline, you often need confidential values like passwords, authentication tokens, service principal secrets etc. when you want to deploy a certain artefact. You don’t want to store those secrets directly in your pipelines as this might pose a considerable security leak. Instead, you either store them as secret variables, or […]

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2025-09-02 (first published: )

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SQLServerCentral Article

How to create your custom GPT SQL Expert

Introduction ChatGPT includes custom GPTs. You can create your own custom GPT. In this article, we will demonstrate how to create a custom GPT expert in SQL Server. Requirements To create your own GPT, you need to use the paid version of ChatGPT. First, go to ChatGPT. Secondly, if you don’t have the paid version, […]

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2025-09-02 (first published: )

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SQLServerCentral Article

MongoDB and NodeJS in action

Overview MongoDB is a popular NoSQL database used for building modern, scalable applications. In this article, we’ll cover how to set up MongoDB on Windows and connect to it using Node.js. We will also perform some basic Create, Read, Update, and Delete (CRUD) operations to ensure we understand fully on how Node.js can be made […]

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2025-09-02 (first published: )

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Question of the Day

The New Database CheckDB

I run this code:

create database experiment
go
use Experiment
go
select DATABASEPROPERTYEX('Experiment', 'LastGoodCheckDbTime')
What is returned?

See possible answers